XPost: comp.mobile.android, alt.comp.os.windows-11   
   From: mariasophia@comprehension.com   
      
   Carlos E. R. wrote:   
   >> Unfortunately, the explanation you gave leaves out an important part   
   >> since even if contacts are stored locally and synced to Google, that's   
   >> only one tiny part of the picture. Any app with contact access can   
   >> upload that data to its own servers, and many do. WhatsApp, Facebook   
   >> Messenger, Telegram, Signal (for contact discovery), LinkedIn and many   
   >> others all do this.   
   >   
   > Not to my knowledge.   
      
   Hi Carlos,   
      
   Thanks for hazarding a guess as I know how brutal Usenet can be on that.   
      
   I'll wager that if you run this Android debug command from your PC   
      adb shell dumpsys package > dump.txt   
   And if you search for the packages that "can" read your contacts   
     "READ_CONTACTS: granted=true"   
   You'll realize there are a lot of apps which have read permission.   
      
   In my case, there were 79 read permissions that were true, but there are   
   duplicates and I have over 600 user-installed apps (1090 in toto).   
      
   So you won't have as many as I have, but it's gonna be a lot more than just   
   google which ... let's be clear... is my main point about privacy.   
      
   Any app with READ_CONTACTS can upload your entire address book to its own   
   servers. Yet most people have no idea how many apps on their phone have   
   that read permission.   
      
   Even I didn't know, until I ran that test myself for Frank's benefit.   
      
   Since I'm a caring and courteous person to my friends, family and   
   neighbors, the number doesn't matter for me because I have an empty   
   contacts database, so they don't get anything even if they try.   
      
      
   But my main privacy edification point for others who think Google is the   
   only one out there with read access to our contacts, it's not.   
      
   There are lots of apps (in most cases) which can read your contacts.   
      
   And syncing our contacts to Google is only one small piece of the privacy   
   picture anyway. The real issue is that many apps on a typical Android phone   
   have READ_CONTACTS permission, and any one of them can upload our entire   
   address book to their own servers.   
      
   Most people never check this, and they don't realize how many apps have   
   access. Even I never checked it until today (because my contacts db is   
   empty so it didn't matter).   
      
   My recommendation is to check it yourself to see which apps on your Android   
   phone have read access to your contacts database. It's not just GMail.   
   --   
   As always, anyone can run the low-privacy highly-marketing solutions,   
   but it takes technical knowledge to run the high-privacy techniques.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)